In Cornell's food science department, chemists, engineers, and microbiologists are working on tomorrow's hot products-- coming soon to a supermarket near you

By Beth Saulnier

On the bookshelves in Professor Joseph Hotchkiss's office is a collection of intriguing little vials, tiny brown-glass bottles that look antique enough to be at home on the lab bench of Louis Pasteur.When Hotchkiss, the chairman of the food science department, begins teaching a new semester of Food Science 101, he likes to pass the vials around, asking his students to take a whiff and jot down the first two words that come to mind.

It's a revelatory exercise, an olfactory Rorschach test. Although the bottles are filled with combinations of chemicals, they contain something more, a power akin to that of Proust's madeleine: the pull of memory. But Hotchkiss puts it more scientifically. "Scent is a powerful psychological stimulus," he says, proffering a bottle of artificial banana flavoring that seems more likely to elicit thoughts of marshmallow "circus peanuts" than tropical breezes. He follows with almond (easily mistaken for cherry and reminiscent of both marzipan sweets and cough syrup), then citrus (Lemonhead candies? Furniture polish?). Then he uncaps a bottle of butyric acid, a fat found in dairy products. Sophisticated palates often identify the scent as a pungent cheese. "Students," says Hotchkiss, "usually say it smells like vomit."

Such is the power of the food scientist: the ability to take you down a road toward a fine Roquefort or the fallout from a Collegetown bacchanalia. The field, simply stated, involves the application of basic science and engineering to food--a definition that comprises everything from devising a way to stave off milk spoilage (by adding carbon dioxide to retard bacterial growth, then taking it out again) to concocting the latest Cheerios flavor. With nutrition guidelines in constant flux, products jockeying for space on supermarket shelves, and the supply chain now thoroughly global--Hotchkiss notes that today's undergrads can't imagine not having Chilean grapes in January--food science is big business. The Institute of Food Technologists, the industry's professional organization, has 22,000 members, many of whom show up for its popular Annual Meeting & Food Expo. "The application of science to food is a huge thing," Hotchkiss says. "People don't advertise this very much, in part because the food industry wants you to think that elves make cookies. But I'll tell you: I've been to a cookie factory, and cookies are made so fast you can't even see them go by."

Not everyone is enthusiastic about what happens in food science labs, or in the production facilities that employ so few Keebler elves. In a January cover story in the New York Times Magazine entitled "Unhappy Meals," best-selling author Michael Pollan condemned food scientists as creators of nutritionally unsound products that have uncoupled Americans from the benefits and pleasures of natural food. (Pollan's most recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, laments "our national eating disorder" and is highly critical of industrial food production.) "Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it," Pollan writes, "while doing little or nothing to improve our health." Among Pollan's credos: avoid anything highly processed, and don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize.

Those proscriptions, of course, nix many of the products at your local supermarket: microwave popcorn flavored to taste like "movie theater butter," Crystal Light drink mix, Boca Burgers that never met a cow, macaroni and cheese laced with neon-orange powder, Lucky Charms cereal, Pop Tarts.While such processed foods clearly don't grow on trees, they're the fruits of a high-stakes industry--one in which Cornell's department is a major player. Food science majors, Hotchkiss notes, are among the University's most heavily recruited and highest-paid hires straight out of undergrad, and the department's PhD program is one of four on the Hill that, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in January, were rated as the best in the nation under a new ranking called the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. (The other three are computer engineering, electrical engineering, and information science.) "What's unique about our program," says Professor S. S. H. Rizvi, "is we take knowledge from chemistry, from microbiology, from engineering, and translate them into a process for making a product. You can study all the chemistry you want, but it's a different feeling when you take that knowledge and put together pieces of the puzzle. That's what attracts me most."

Rizvi's own projects have included creating an extrusion process to form whole grains of nutritionally supplemented rice from broken pieces normally discarded as waste; flavors (say, jasmine) can be added to suit regional preferences. He is also working on using supercritical fluids--those at high temperature and pressure--to speed up the leavening process in baking; devising a method for delivering beneficial bacteria to the intestines while preventing them from being destroyed in the stomach; and creating a way to remove the yellow color and "cooked" flavor from evaporated milk while retaining its shelf stability, to provide a more palatable product for countries without widespread refrigeration.

Rizvi's colleague Professor David Barbano '70, PhD '78, specializes in dairy--working to improve the safety, quality, and shelf life of foods made with milk, as well as expanding the variety of milk products. Recently, he's been manipulating the chemistry of mozzarella--one of the most widely consumed cheeses due to America's appetite for pizza--to alter how it browns, melts, and stretches, and also trying to make low-fat cheddar cheese taste better (by using a mechanical process to take out the fat after the aging process has imparted the correct flavors). The cheddar work, like many of Cornell's food science projects, is funded both by private companies and government grants--in this case, a federal program through which dairy farmers contribute to advertising and research. Such work could lead to a Cornell patent on the technology and either an exclusive licensing arrangement with a company or a low-cost license available to all. "Sometimes it makes sense to patent things," Barbano says, "and other times it makes sense to tell the whole world about it because it benefits everybody in the dairy industry."

At Cornell, the food science department comprises some fifteen faculty, 100 undergrads, and 65 graduate students. The field has a presence on both the Ithaca campus and at the Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station; each has a pilot facility where researchers can string together equipment--ovens, extruders, pasteurizers, freeze-dryers, ice cream makers, and more--to create an experimental production line. "This is where the food industry stops on its way to the marketplace," Rizvi says, donning a hairnet as he enters the Ithaca pilot plant on the ground floor of Stocking Hall. "Between Geneva and here, we can handle almost any product."Dozens of yellow and orange milk crates are neatly stacked next to the gleaming stainless steel machines, each on wheels for easy reconfiguration; the cavernous room is scrupulously clean. Today, Juan Pellecer, MS '97, and his colleagues from the International Food Network, an Ithaca-based consulting firm, are packaging samples of a client's new frozen turkey sandwich for taste-testing. Asked about the sandwich's ingredients, Pellecer politely demurs; it's proprietary information.

On the same February day, fifty miles away in Geneva, the department's other pilot facility is also humming. At one end, representatives of an Australian company are testing a new (also proprietary) piece of equipment; at the other, research technician Herb Cooley is running a commercial retort (akin to an autoclave) that heats prepared foods to kill bacteria. The thirty-year veteran of the pilot plant ducks out for a moment and returns with a chilled, unlabeled can filled with another recent test subject: a sweet drink made of milk, rice, and cinnamon that's popular in Mexico. SolMaya, a Maryland company, is manufacturing it for the U.S. market and rented time in the pilot plant as part of its production- design process. Today, Cooley is testing turkey-and-squash baby food, which fills several dozen small glass jars, each equipped with sensors to record its temperature. Professor Olga Padilla-Zakour, PhD '91, points out the huge, ancient-looking hulk of a machine that the computerized retort replaced. "In a university setting, we have the best thermal processing facility in the country," she says of the pilot plant. "We're very service-oriented, very friendly with industry."

As part of the Ag college's mission to support New York State food producers, the Geneva staff helps local companies and aspiring entrepreneurs develop products through the station's Food Venture Center. A display outside the pilot plant shows some of the products they've worked on: cashew butter, curried banana chutney, tart cherries in juice, raspberry honey mustard, garlic dill pickles, jarred peaches. Padilla-Zakour and her colleagues have been helping the state's maple growers expand their product lines, and the evidence of their efforts covers several countertops in a lab down the hall from her office. One researcher debates the best shape for plastic tubes of maple sugar intended for snacking à la Pixie Stix; Padilla- Zakour offers a sample of the lab's new maple meringues, lauding them as shelf-stable and easy for growers to make and sell in gift shops. Other projects include designing heatable packaging for individual servings of 100 percent maple syrup and perfecting the formula for maple jelly.

The lab's refrigerator is packed with samples of its current subjects, from blueberry vinegar to fresh linguine to a sauce (made in Woodstock, New York) called BuddhaPesto. Companies pay by the hour for consulting services, lab work, and time in the pilot plant, with out-of-state firms charged a slightly higher rate. "When we walk into the supermarket, we recognize a tremendous number of products that we worked with," Padilla-Zakour says. "What's fascinating for me is to get to know people, interact with them, and be able to apply food science to real situations and real products. That is valuable for us in terms of designing our extension and research programs, and also for mentoring students who want to go into the industry."

Julie Goddard '99 and David Landers '07 are two such students, though they came to food science from opposite directions. Goddard earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, then went to work for Kraft Foods--where her projects included Maxwell House coffee and Jell-O--before returning to the Hill for her PhD. (She took the job after an internship at a paper mill, opting for Kraft in part because of "the difference between coming home smelling like the mill and smelling like chocolate pudding.") Goddard is doing her dissertation research on "active" packaging materials--for example, a milk carton that could make its contents digestible to people who are lactose intolerant-- and pondering whether to go back to industry or seek a job in academia.

Landers, on the other hand, came from the kitchen: he's earning his BS after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, the chef 's training ground informally known as the CIA. "I love food, and now I'm learning about it in a completely different way," says the senior, one of four culinary graduates currently studying food science at Cornell. "The first day of class in the CIA, you learn that food is culture, food is sitting around a table, eating and drinking, gastronomy. I get here and food is water, carbohydrate, protein. There's a big difference in how we think about food, and not much crossover between the two; I'd like to bridge that. The Research Chefs Association has a term for it--‘culinology'-- that's the blending of food science and the culinary arts."

Goddard and Landers have been heavily involved with the student teams that create products for the annual competitions sponsored by the Research Chefs Association (RCA) and the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT). Last year, Goddard co-led the team that came in second in the IFT judging with a frozen, Hispanic-inspired snack food consisting of cream cheese and guava paste inside a cornmeal wrapper; this year's entry was Sous Chef India, a collection of sauces for use in dining halls and other food service venues. "Almost 50 percent of the dollars spent now are for food out of the home," Landers notes of this year's entry, which failed to make the finals. "We figured we could make another product that goes into the grocery store, but why not cater to that trend?"

In mid-March, Landers went to New Orleans for the finals of the RCA competition, for which the students had been challenged to create a Spanish-themed chicken dish suitable for serving in a "fast casual" restaurant like Applebee's or Chili's. The team's dish--braised chicken leg quarters with romesco sauce, served over a puree of roasted garlic and cauliflower--garnered third place. "Another thing that drew me to food science is that you identify with the final product," says Goddard. "There's a human component, because we all eat."

Food science, like so many other innovations, has its roots in war. In 1800, as Napoleon was moving vast armies across Europe, the emperor offered a prize of 12,000 francs to whoever came up with a way to preserve food for his troops. The winner was a French chef named Nicolas Appert, who devised a method for putting perishables into sturdy glass bottles, sealing them, and dunking them in boiling water. "That brought science to what, at the time, had been all art," Hotchkiss says. Appert is considered the father of canning--also known as "appertization"--and one of the IFT's honors for lifetime achievement is the Appert Award.

Today's food scientists may be working with much more sophisticated methods, but--for better or worse--the industry is guided by the same principles of supply and demand as in Napoleon's day.Hotchkiss says that although food companies are constantly criticized for marketing unhealthy products, the industry is "absolutely, 100 percent consumer driven." Like media outlets that feature coverage of celebrity misadventures over the latest economic news, food companies are in business to give people what they want, not what they need. And unfortunately, for complex physiological and evolutionary reasons, many of us instinctively reach for the French fries rather than the steamed kale. "I take the Pogo view of it," Hotchkiss says. " ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.' Food companies don't put things out there unless they think people want them. In fact, they spend zillions of dollars trying to figure out what consumers want. If you think it's bad, don't put it in your shopping cart. I promise you--it won't take long for it to disappear from the store."